Latina/o & Latin American Pop Culture
Drawing on contemporary popular culture, this course explores what "Latinness" and the "national" constitute in the creation and consumption of Latino identities as deployed both in the United States and Latin America. Exploring how Latina, Latino, and Latin American bodies inhabit particular cultural and geographic contexts, the seminar addresses the ways that popular cultural forms are developed, contested, or resolved vis-à-vis issues of difference, multicultural inclusiveness, domestic history, and narratives of exile and migration. The deployment of popular aesthetic forms in both Latina/o and Latin American contexts orients us to think about the ways that popular culture operates as a structurally active agent countering exoticized or "tropicalized" referents for peoples, nations, and cultural practices. The aim of this seminar is to examine how "our" connections with U.S. Latina/o and Latin American populations are made, or separated, by popular culture and the world of the commodity. Of particular concern are such questions as: What are the pressing sociocultural and political issues confronted by U.S. national culture and how are these accounted for, if not represented, through the different perspectives and terrains that shape Latino and Latin American popular cultures? How does the seeming contemporary development of U.S. Latino cultures dialogue not only with Americanness but with Latin Americanness as well? We will unravel these questions by analyzing multiple forms of cultural production, including novels, films, television shows (e.g., "Ugly Betty" [2006-], "Dora the Explorer" [2000-]), and "¿Qué Pasa, USA?" [1977-1980]), advertising, comic strips, food fusions as "Nuevo Latino," and music.
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